What is the real development costs of Debian GNU / Linux – How much costs the development of a Free Software projects

Free Software (FS) is free as in freedom as well as free as in price. Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is developed by geek hobbyist which voluntarily put their time and effort in writting, testing and sharing with anyone for free million of lines of programming code. This doesn't mean however the price of free software costs is 0 (zero). Though the "end product" – Free Software developed is FREE, "real" software costs as with any other product costs huge money.

"By using David A Wheeler’s sloccount tool and average wage of a developer of US$72,533 (using median estimates from Salary.com and PayScale.com for 2011) I summed the individual results to find a total of 419,776,604 source lines of code for the ‘pristine’ upstream sources, in 31 programming languages — including 429 lines of Cobol and 1933 lines of Modula3!

In my analysis the projected cost of producing Debian Wheezy in February 2012 is US$19,070,177,727 (AU$17.7B, EUR€14.4B, GBP£12.11B), making each package’s upstream source code worth an average of US$1,112,547.56 (AU$837K) to produce. Impressively, this is all free (of cost).

James has done incredible job with this great research and he deserves applause. However I believe the numbers proposed by his research are slightly different if we speak about realistic cost of Debian GNU / Linux. The real costs of the working software ready to install on a user PC are way higher, as according to Jeb's research only the software cost based on code line count is considered.

Hence James software estimation calculates only the programming costs and miss many, many factors that constitute the software end cost. Some of the many, many REAL COST / expenses for developing a huge Free Software project like Debian GNU / Linux to be considered are:

g) Time spend on research and self-actualization by software developer)

h) Time spend on software Quality Assurance

This are most of the multiple factors which should probably influence the cost of any non-free (proprietary software) project. No matter this costs apply for non-free software, it perfectly applies for free software as well.With all said if if we assume the non-programming costs are equal to the programming costs of $ 19 000 000 000 (suggested by Jeb). This means the real cost of Debian will presumably be at least $32 000 000 000. Putting $ 19 billion for all this long list of "additional" costs (besides pure source) factors is probably still very under-scored number.

the developers use of their own computers (hardware depreciation)

electricity bill of the volunteer (developer) working on the program or project

electricity bills for servers where free software is stored and available for download

volunteer developer IT skills and tech knowledge (KNOW HOW)

Internet, network, dial up bandwidth cost

personal time put in FS development (programming, design, creativity etc.)! here the sub costs are long:

Costs for Project Management Leaders / Project Coordination

The complexity of each of the projects constituting Debian

Very interesting figure from Jeb's research is the Programming Languages break down by source code figure. Jamesresearch reveals on the 4 major programming languages used in the 17000+ software projects (part of Debian GNU / Linux):

ANSI C with 168,536,758 – (40% of all projects source code)

C++ at 83,187,329 – (20% of all projects source)

Java 34,698,990 – (lines of code 8% of sources)

Lisp – (7% of all projects source code)

His research also provides a general idea on how much the source code of some of the major FOSS projects costs. Here is a copy of his figures

Individual Projects

Other highlights by project included:

Project

Version

Thousands of SLOC

Projected cost at US$72,533/developer/year

Samba

3.6.1

2,000

US$101 (AU$93M)

Apache

2.2.9

693

US$33.5M (AU$31M)

MySQL

5.5.17

1,200

US$64.2M (AU$59.7M)

Perl

5.14.2

669

US$32.3M (AU$30M)

PHP

5.3.9

693

US$33.5M (AU$31.1M)

Bind

9.7.3

319

US$14.8M (AU$13.8M)

Moodle

1.9.9

396

US$18.6M (AU$17.3M)

Dasher

4.11

109

US$4.8M (AU$4.4M)

DVSwitch

0.8.3.6

6

US$250K (AU$232K)

As you can imagine all the source evaluation results, are highly biased and are open for discussion, since evaluating a free software project/s is a hard not to say impossible task. The "open" model of development makes a project very hard to track, open source model implies too many unexpected variables missing from the equation for clear calculation on costs. What is sure however if turned in money it is very expensive to produce. At present moment Debian Project is sponsored only through donations. The usual yearly budget 5 years ago for Debian was only $80 000 dollars a year!! You can check Debian Project annual reports throughout the years here , for year 2012 Debian Project budget is as low as $ 222, 677 (US Dollars)! The output price of the software the project provides is enormous high if compared to the low project expenses!

For us the free software users, price is not a concern, Debian is absolutely free both as in freedom and free as in beer

4 Responses to “What is the real development costs of Debian GNU / Linux – How much costs the development of a Free Software projects”

Software cost estimation is tricky business even when all the variables are known (which we certainly donâ€™t have). One thing to remember is that COCOMO was created to model large institutional projects, which often donâ€™t compare well with distributed open-source projects. Beyond just development time, COCOMO is meant to include the design, specification drafting, reviewing and management overhead that goes along with producing quality software.

This model seems to be most accurate with mature, large projects. Young projects with little activity are typically overvalued.

[…] might be a bit sluggish. However for most projects they should be of a great add on value, actually SLOCCount was already used for calculating the development costs of GNU / Linux and other projects o… and therefore it is proven it works well with ENORMOUS software source line code calculations […]

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